Because I craved the contrast

23 April 2010 07:24 AM Categories: Fiction

My last boyfriend, Steven, had bay water skin, salty and weathered. He smelled of corn stalks and Maker’s Mark. His family owned the small gas station/convenience store off 213 where underaged kids bought beer and porn magazines and filled up on puckered cheese dogs gone too long in the warmer. That’s where we met, me parking the scooter on a Sunday morning, Steven pulling up in a Ford pickup. I was the only person he knew who drove a scooter and refused to eat red meat. The Eastern Shore was all four-wheel drive and gun racks, tire flaps with silhouettes of busty women: “beer, barbecues, and bosoms,” we used to joke. Steven lived in a small cottage on Gilly’s Neck, a spit of land named after a distant relative who had landed there in the early 1700s. His grandfather built a duck blind adjacent to the creek and on icy late autumn mornings Steven left the comfort of our bed, the pull of my naked body, to put on camouflage and hunker in the blind with a shotgun and a thermos of spiked coffee. I never got used to this, to the mix of blood and booze, the freezer filled with the dark flesh of Canada geese. We celebrated the difference, drank and fought and fucked with malice.

I moved west in part to escape the relationship, to wash the taste of salt and blood out of my mouth. And there was Shelton, clean-smelling, like soap, like a freshly-washed window, sitting across the aisle at our graduate school orientation. He was thin and pale with a cap of dishwater blonde hair. When he contributed to class discussions, he pushed his rimless glasses back and wiggled in his chair before over-intellectualizing a dot point into a master’s thesis. Silence filled him with anxiety. He adorned it with linguistic frills, explaining simple concepts with an academic loquaciousness. It was cute, for a time.

I've been working on a short story and doing very little other creative work (outside of the Round Robin). This is an excerpt of my story, still in infant form. And since I'm in the middle of it, I have absolutely no perspective on its quality, but I wanted to put something out here, a crumb, a thought, a naughty word, a study in contrasts.

Tags: fiction, Eastern Shore, boyfriends

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